no one was predicting that sort of the republican strategy for securing a romney victory would come to grief so kind of spectacularly. i mean, i'm telling you. even the communities who came out to vote, i think, were shocked by their own numbers and by their own power. i mean, when you look at the cuban community in florida, a community that has historically voted super conservative and suddenly see an entirely new generation voting, and you see those numbers that they put up for obama. it was extraordinary. and i think that a lot of folks have very poor sense of what's happening in this country on the ground. i mean, they're kind of all the way up here, whether it's age, class, institutional divisions. and they don't really have a real kind of panoramic or even a deep view of the real sort of granular shifts that have occurred in this country, that have been occurring. >> if you took that grand narrative and reduced it to a very short story, what is it? what's the plot? >> i think the plot is that there is an enormous gap between the way the country presents itself and imagines itself